Milestone For Ms.

Bold And Controversial Magazine Turns 25

January 26, 1997|By Kristin Choo. Special to the Tribune.

She's only 25, but she's as battle-scarred as any veteran of the culture wars. She has a dozen daughters in high places, but for much of her life, her finances have been an outright mess, and she has dangled close to death more times than she cares to remember. She has been called a strumpet and a prude, but never a lady. Still, as she strides toward the 21st Century, she's every bit as mulish, outrageous and uncompromising as the day she burst upon the world, kicking and screaming in protest.

Ms. magazine is 25 years old. Founded in 1972 with the premise that, as founder Gloria Steinem put it, "women are full human beings," its birth was as unconventional as its later life, the product of a sympathetic man's eagerness to try out a new concept and the conviction of a group of feminists that the movement that was reshaping women's lives needed its own voice.

Steinem became convinced of this need while she toured the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s giving lectures on women's liberation. "Again and again, a woman in the audience would stand up and say: `Thank God, I'm not alone. I thought I was the only one who felt this way,' " Steinem said.

Steinem felt a hunger for information among the women to whom she spoke. "We need to start a newsletter," she told Brenda Feigen, Steinem's co-founder of the Women's Action Alliance.

"Not a newsletter," Steinem remembered Feigen saying, "a magazine."

It was a suggestion Steinem resisted, according to Mary Thom, a former editor at Ms. and author of "Inside Ms.: Twenty-five years of the magazine and the feminist movement," to be published in July by Henry Holt. "Gloria had to be backed into it," Thom reported. "She knew it would be an enormous undertaking."

Steinem, then 38, had gained fame as a feature writer for some of the top magazines in America. Her serene, somewhat glacial beauty, combined with her articulateness and unflappable calm had made her a media darling, the most visible feminist of the time. She was a natural choice to head a feminist magazine.

Steinem began talking with female editors and writers about a women-owned, feminist-run magazine. Many of these women had seen their stories about the women's movement rejected by editors and publishers, most of whom were men. "They were told, `We've already done our feminist piece,' " Thom recalled.

One woman who offered advice and expertise was Pat Carbine, then the 40-year-old editor in chief of McCall's magazine. Carbine, one of the most well-known and respected women in the publishing business, helped Steinem scout around for financing. But investors were cold to the idea of a feminist magazine, believing there would be no market for it.

"They kept saying, `Where's your market research?' " said Joanne Edgar, who was on the original team at Ms. "Well, we didn't have any money for market research."

At this point, Clay Felker, editor of New York magazine, stepped in with an idea. Felker was interested in the concept of a one-shot, a single issue of a magazine to test the market. New York magazine traditionally produced a double issue at the end of each year, and Felker proposed that Steinem and her team write a 30-page insert that would appear in the 1971 year-end double issue. In exchange, New York magazine would publish a 130-page version of the same insert as a one-shot preview of the new feminist magazine.

Felker's proposal was accepted, and in December 1971, the year-end issue of New York magazine appeared with 30 pages of a new magazine called Ms. inserted in its center. The insert contained material daring even by today's standards, including articles on abortion, lesbianism and writing a marriage contract. But perhaps the piece that won the most long-lasting fame was "The Housewife's Moment of Truth," in which writer Jane O'Reilley wrote of the "click! of recognition," when an ordinary woman suddenly realizes that she is being treated unfairly and starts to rebel.

"A friend of mine stood and watched her husband step over a pile of toys on the stairs, put there to be carried up," wrote O'Reilley. " `Why can't you get this stuff put away?' he mumbled. Click! `You have two hands,' she said, turning away."

This article and the others in the insert had New York women clicking like Geiger counters at Chernobyl, and New York magazine sales surged for that issue.

But the creators of the fledgling magazine were still nervous.

"The preview issue was the real test," Steinem recalled. The magazine might do well with sophisticated New Yorkers, but would it play in Peoria?

The preview issue of Ms. went on sale nationwide on Jan. 25, 1972. Steinem went on tour promoting it, but in San Francisco, she received disturbing news. The television and radio stations she was to appear on were having trouble finding a copy of the magazine.

Frantic, she telephoned Felker in New York. "There must be a problem with your distributors," she told him.